Marc F. Bellemare Posts

In January 2013, I wrote a post titled Quinoa Nonsense, of Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists. That was the second one of my posts to go viral.*

And did that post ever take me places–both figuratively and literally.

It figuratively took me places, because after I wrote that post, Seth Gitter got in touch with me to mention he’d been meaning to look at the effects of the quinoa price spike, and to ask whether I’d be interested in collaborating on that. Because of the same post, The Economist ran an article in their Leaders section last year titled “In praise of quinoa,” in which they were talking about the wonders of international trade, and in which they name-checked me. (In the same article, they also name-checked Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump, so make of that what you will.)

And it literally took me places, because Seth and I were soon thereafter flying to Peru to consult for the International Trade Center on the welfare impacts of the quinoa price spike. That was the first of several trips to Peru, a country where I am planning on doing more work as early as next summer.

In my January 2013 post, I ranted against journalists who present uninformed, sloppy thoughts as gospel. My foremost example then was this excerpt from an article in the Guardian:

Here is the eighth of eight lectures I gave at the University of Copenhagen in May for a course titled Causal Inference with Observational Data. This lecture is the second part of my “tricks of the trade” module, which directly stems from this series of posts.

Last year, three of our doctoral students approached me with an offer I could not refuse: The United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) had a call for proposals for researchers to use its Vietnamese panel data set to study questions of interest to development. Could we perhaps study the effects of an unanticipated change in tenurial (in)security for a specific group of landowners?

Last week, UNU-WIDER released the working paper Kenn Chua, Julieth Santamaria, Khoa Vu, and I wrote for them on this topic, titled “Tenurial Insecurity and Agricultural Investment: Evidence from Vietnam.” Here is a link to working paper’s page on the UNU-WIDER website (the link to the .pdf is on the left-hand side of the page), and here is the abstract: